Excerpt: Tales from the Yoga Studio: A Novel by Rain Mitchell

Today in January Magazine, an excerpt of Tales from the Yoga Studio: A Novel by Rain Mitchell:

It's at moments like this -- when she's put the class through their paces and has them settled back onto their mats in a state of collective peace, contentment, and deep relaxation, when their bodies are glistening with a light sheen of sweat, when the afternoon sun is glinting off the end of the Silver Lake Reservoir, which she can see through the wall of windows she and Alan had installed on the southern side of the studio, when all seems temporarily right with the world -- that Lee starts craving a cigarette.

"Inhale through your nose into whatever traces of tension you're still holding on to, and sigh it all out through your mouth," she says. "Let it go."

The craving is just a ghost from the past that visits her from time to time, drops in from the years of misguided study and too much stress at Columbia University Medical Center, when, like a quarter of the students, she would rush out to 165th Street from a lecture on emphysema, abnormal cell growth, or heart disease, light up, and huddle against the buildings in the gray dampness of those New York afternoons.

See the full excerpt of Rain Mitchell’s Tales from the Yoga Studio here.